reflections on bearing the weight of the wait

thriving

We watered our lawn too much. My husband told me this after consulting other lawn experts, otherwise known as neighbors. He talks about lawns like I talk about cooking.

If we water our lawn too much the roots don’t learn to grow deep and seek out water on their own. Who knew? Well, other people is the short answer. Seeking roots are important when it gets hot and dry. It’s Texas. It gets hot and dry.

So, we backed down on our watering, but not before we felt the pain of our utility bill. Yikes! The first year of home ownership is a year for learning. What that really means is a year of doing lots of weird things because you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Now its summer again and I find I like my lawn to be green and its starting to get a tad light green in patches. I really want to ramp up the watering so it gets dark green again. I’m scared the grass won’t find the water.

What if it dies?

My own life, my kids lives, the lives of students I work with on campus. I see the same truth play out. Surface green looks so good and there’s really nothing wrong with seeing outward growth and health.

The big question is what kind of roots are being trained? Are they seeking roots trained to strain towards sustenance? Am I? Or weak shallow roots that don’t know what to do when drought comes?

When dry threatens, I want to ramp up the watering schedule. It looks good and works fast. And its appropriate at times, too. The lawn gets green pretty quick when I water it more. More attention pays off in the present tense.

But hot and dry always come at some point and not just in Texas.

How have I trained the lawn? How am I training my spiritual life? My children? Am I trying to help so much that I train shallow and weak people who don’t know what to do when hot and dry come in life? Am I afraid that answers won’t be supplied from the depths so I feel I need to supply from the surface?

Watching my kids struggle to stretch roots down to the foundation of things is difficult. Feeling the pain of it myself is confusing.

Searching for depth is just that…a search.

It is a lack of knowing exactly where the sustenance is but sending out feelers, shoots to investigate. It looks like absorbing long passages of God’s word, the Bible, gleaning and sifting for who God is in new ways. Sometimes searching is finding nothing that feels helpful but absorbing more truth. Later it makes more sense. Or, seeking is trying new things to discover where I fit in the body of Christ. Learning new skills necessary for a new circumstance in life is a form of stretching to new depths.

The assurance I have is that I will find sustenance, and others will too, if we search for that which truly sustains. It may not always seem enough or produce a green enough lawn to look pretty to everyone, but God will keep me growing spiritually when I am connected to Him, the Giver of life.

My lawn may not look as green as everyone else’s. That’s a challenging reality at times. I am learning again to trust that the exterior appearance of life doesn’t always correlate directly to spiritual health.

Next time I will write about the tree that looked dead for months. Spoiler alert. It’s not dead!

Deep roots, searching roots, trained to send out feelers into the depths during the hot and dry times is health more than shallow and green during ideal conditions.

Not all brown things are dead.

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My husband is a mechanical sort. So was my dad. I know just enough from listening to them talk to make wild assumptions on what is wrong with machines. Most often I jump directly to worst case scenario. I get the feeling that is not particularly endearing to some, ahem, my husband.

Like the time we returned to our assignment in Asia after a 6 month absence. Our cute orange car waited 6 months for us parked outside. Friends cleaned it a time or two and started it a time or two, but it was lonely.

Our first morning back I headed to the car to go and stock our bare fridge and cupboards. The engine turned over, and over, and over, and over…and didn’t start. I gassed it and tried again and again. Our car was dead, I knew it. Stone cold dead.

I also knew just enough to know that maybe stepping on the gas repeatedly could flood the engine and undermine my efforts to bring Orangey back to life. I laid off, took a breath, and eventually got to the grocery store.

So, here I am years later trying to write again after months of upheaval and absence from my blog and not writing. I primed the pump last week at the library by checking out books on writing like Stephen King’s book On Writing which I stumbled across in the stacks.

I took it as a sign that it was time to try and begin again.

Plus, I heard it was good. Stephen King’s writing is not my genre by a long stretch. But, his book On Writing is more my style and quite a fascinating and humorous read so far.

I checked out another on the craft of memoir writing. I haven’t cracked it yet. It sounds too serious, a little more ambitious than I’m ready to read.

My library trip and a couple short editing projects, and I felt a bit of the spark of desire to write again. It felt good. Like a visit with an old, familiar friend. Like unpacking a box and remembering a beloved object not seen for years.

I started to feel ready to write again.

Plus, an automated woman from wordpress called and warned me to pay up or I’d lose my domain. I didn’t pay up soon enough. I lost it and now must pay a fine for my procrastination. But, something about a call from wordpress made me think about writing again.

Like a kick in the pants.

I remember paying for my domain name last year. It was a huge step for me to put money towards writing. I was so serious about it. I realize I don’t want to pack up my love for writing.

So, here I am writing…

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Here in the beginning of a New Year, I like to plod through a few thoughts and pause enough to give some mental and spiritual nods at the passing of a year…a beginning and an end. That pause took place on New Years’ morning while kids and kids’ friends slumbered away after a night of “partying”.

Usually I like to mark my pause a little more seriously but fever (mine), travel (my husband), and school breaks (one day only) conspired and I found myself sneaking in a moment on New Years’ Day. I noticed a few things in my review of 2013, the root lines God grew deeper this year.

Farewell: Flipping back and forth to my review of the year 2012, I noticed a theme of farewells in 2012. It bit a little because today I bid farewell to another family with even more farewells on the docket later this spring. Farewell was a theme for 2012, 2013, and will be a theme for 2014. Hmm. Not a theme I enjoy but a very present theme in life overseas.

Provision: I shed a few tears that morning as I listed some disappointments and remembered some painful turns in our path this fall. That tearfulness stayed with me a for a few days. In fact, it’s still with me now.

But what brings me to tears is not so much the disappointments as that I was never alone. And, I saw that I was not unprepared for the journey the Lord prepared for us. Lots of little provisions and preparations flooded my memory. That brought tears to my eyes.

Fellowship: When I hear this word, a picture flashes through my mind of cheap coffee in Styrofoam cups in the midst of a din of talking. Growing up, the main gathering place at the church was the “Fellowship Hall”. But that is a cheap and incomplete image of fellowship, I know. It makes me smile and give thanks for my roots.

No, the fellowship I’m talking of is more of the Fellowship of the Rings type of fellowship. I only half slept through the movie so I won’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of that series. But, I do know that the fellowship of the rings was about a mission. It was a calling followed together by a band of misfits and unlikely heroes that desired to do something necessary and sacrificial no matter the cost. The bonds formed in this kind of journey transformed all involved.

That is the true fellowship of the brotherhood of believers and I experienced more of that this year. Even as I write that sentence I want to say more…but it must wait for another time. It changes one, that kind of fellowship. Know that. It is much more than coffee in Styrofoam cups inside a church.

Farewells, Provision, Fellowship. Rich soil, I think, for the plantings of this next year, 2014.

What themes did you see in your life in 2013?

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This past week a host of troubles loomed before us ranging from midnight trips to the emergency room for my son’s breathing problems to hiccups registering kids in their new school and everything in between and on the outside too.

What miraculously never left me in these and moments and others was the settled knowledge that God’s presence in my life never left…not for one second. I still trembled with fear and shook with sadness but I knew He was in the storm with me. I’ve not always been that person.

Presence is a powerful thing. The past few weeks highlighted my need for the presence of the Lord who never leaves me. What I learned anew was how desperately I also needed the presence of His family who stands with me.

When friends showed up on our doorstep one night, I reveled in their presence. When another friend stood by us in a special way it moved me to tears. I needed their presence.

And, there’s just something about being bodily present with the family of God that cannot be explained…something that overpowers the worries of the world in a way nothing else can.

So I stand humbled by the presence of God in the storm this week. Beyond that I know much more deeply my need for the physical presence of the body of Christ. I’m sure I have still more to learn about presence too!

I’d love to hear about a time in your life when you realized how much you needed the body of Christ. Please share below!

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Our neighbor cultivates a small, self-claimed plot of the common area of our apartment complex. We pass by in slow motion, our footsteps stall as we navigate the stepping-stones past her garden. We traipse by daily and the kids are the first to notice the grapes that finally hang from the trellis or the flower bud that bloomed in all its beauty. The delight on their faces keeps routing us past her garden.

Her cultivated vines contrast with another arbor we seek shade under. Vines cover the walkway and we rest there on hot days, enjoying the shade. It took us a while but we finally realized the vines were grape vines too! Lots of shade but no grapes. The kids expressed their surprise. I did too!

Because I grew up in suburbia and I never enjoyed gardening, agrarian pictures of spiritual life come to me in a fog. I kept thinking of the differences between the cultivated garden and the wild grapevine. What surprised me is that the untended grapevine provided shade which we enjoyed but it was indistinct and unable to offer bodily nourishment. It needed trimming, pruning, and cutting by someone with a vision for what it could be–a source of food and shade.

Sometimes I rather wish I was just a source of shade for others. A place to rest, to have light-hearted fun, to take a break from the heat of the world. No uncomfortable conversations…no cutting needed. Or I want to pursue only what seems personally enjoyable. The vines remind me that is not all God desires for His people. It falls far short.

He desires for me to become a source of real nourishment for the hungry. He wants to transform me into a tended grapevine, to submit to the cutting and stripping and arranging so that the juice flowing through me from Him funnels to fruit and shade for others.

Again I find myself asking what needs cutting and where to direct my energies, talents, and gifts. In 7 days my kids all go to school and I find myself with many hours in the day to devote to new things. My bent is to want to do it all and say yes to everything that comes across my path that seems the least bit interesting.

But, the lesson of the vines reminds me that fruit comes when I submit to the cutting and pruning and arranging of the One with the vision for my life.

Now…here’s where I wish I was the one pruning, the one with the big picture so that I didn’t have to trust so much! But, I guess that is part of what it means to trust…to submit to the hands of the One with the vision.

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I wrote on the chalkboard this week. The one that hangs by the kitchen door I pass through a hundred times a day. The board I write stuff on so my scattered ideas have a fighting chance to hone onto a task or two…or ten.

“2 boxes” I wrote. 2 boxes to hold my home school teacher’s guides and workbooks used and unused. 2 boxes to clear off at least two precious bookshelves. I needed two boxes because we enrolled our children in an international school a month ago.

I fully expected to need these notebooks and guides this very month. But, life overseas sometimes…no…often means rapid change. In mid-June I began praying about a change for our kids’ education for the coming year and by early July we filled out the forms. That’s nigh on the speed of light to me.

As I sort out all the factors that go into making a decision like this it slowly distills into a phrase I hear in Asian culture. Half the Sky. Women hold up half the sky so the saying goes. It’s a beautiful phrase and I love it. But, I saw myself growing weary because I was going to try to hold up the whole sky if I continued homeschooling.

Even now I want to say I could’ve done it. We didn’t have to enroll them. And those statements ring some truth but I say them because I want people to see me as strong…as someone who can hold up the whole sky not just half. The phantom rears its ugly head. The lie that strength is found in toughness and survival and capability rather than in resting on the One who holds everything together.

As a very hot summer month slipped by, I took up a few new and exciting responsibilities for the coming year, I stopped buying the kids winter clothes because they will wear uniforms, and I mentally planned to shop and drink coffee at Starbucks their first day in school.

At home, I looked more and more at those two bookshelves in our homeschool room and the books that laid on top of other books on other overfilled shelves above and I embraced reality in a more physical way. I began pulling things off for storage. It is not the time to give them away but it is the time to pack them away in the two boxes I keep forgetting to get at the grocery store.

A new season begins for our family…and I still don’t know what new name to give the homeschool room.

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I remember hearing Elisabeth Elliot speak in college. The packed room filled with women and a few men as I sat towards the back with a few friends. Passion and Purity ranked high among the must-reads of my college crowd at the time. I thought it a strange book…a bit over the top. Now, she stood telling me she thought girls should wear skirts. I’m sure I smirked.

Now, 16 years later I still hold to a different view on skirts but I sit more and more often at the literary feet of Elisabeth Elliot. I liken her to a spiritual grandmother, a little old-fashioned in some areas but consistently delivering piercing truth. Truth pierces the heart and draws me into closer fellowship with the Lord…when I listen well…I, the young granddaughter of the faith.

These Strange Ashes, A Chance to Die, and now The Path of Loneliness rank at the tops of my list for the beginning Elisabeth Elliot mentee. Meat for the soul I call them.

These Strange Ashes recounts Elisabeth’s first year on the field and it still speaks to what one can expect the first year on the field. I lend my copy out and make it clear I expect it back!

A Chance to Die takes a thorough look at the life of Amy Carmichael. Elisabeth doesn’t shy away from Amy’s strengths and weaknesses. Wrestling with the complexity of Amy’s character and her service give me great hope for what the Lord can do through me with all my “complexity.”

The Path of Loneliness required me to choke down a destructive mental barrier as I saw it on a friend’s shelf this past week pondering what book to borrow. I don’t like to tell people when I am lonely. I even wanted to hide this book while I read it instead of leaving it on my side table! Ahh…pride! Today I finished the book and I just might start at the front and read it again copying down favorite passages. I might end up copying the whole book. I do plan to buy a copy… plus a few to give away as I feel led.

Passion and Purity…well…I still need to go back and pick that one up again and rethink it.

I read Elisabeth Elliot now expecting to feel the rub and pull involved in taking a vigorous hike towards greater trust and obedience to the Lord.

As with any hike, the anticipation and joy of the summit compels more strongly the farther I get on the hike.